New milestone in the search for water on distant planets

Astronomers have found water vapor in the atmosphere of a planet about four times bigger than Earth, in the constellation Cygnus about 124 light years - or nearly 729 trillion miles - from our home planet. In the quest to ...

Astronomers Find Hyperactive Galaxies in the Early Universe

(PhysOrg.com) -- Looking almost 11 billion years into the past, astronomers have measured the motions of stars for the first time in a very distant galaxy and clocked speeds upwards of one million miles per hour, about twice ...

A new lens for life-searching space telescopes

The University of Arizona Richard F. Caris Mirror Laboratory is a world leader in the production of the world's largest telescope mirrors. In fact, it is currently fabricating mirrors for the largest and most advanced earth-based ...

Meanwhile, in a galaxy not so far, far away...

The fantasy creations of the "Star Wars" universe are strikingly similar to real planets in our own Milky Way galaxy. A super Earth in deep freeze? Think ice-planet "Hoth." And that distant world with double sunsets can't ...

Gravity-bending find leads to Kepler meeting Einstein

(Phys.org) —NASA's Kepler space telescope has witnessed the effects of a dead star bending the light of its companion star. The findings are among the first detections of this phenomenon—a result of Einstein's theory ...

Sharp-eyed ALMA spots a flare on famous red giant star

Super-sharp observations with the telescope ALMA have revealed what seems to be a gigantic flare on the surface of Mira, one of the closest and most famous red giant stars in the sky. Activity like this in red giants—similar ...

Astronomers puzzled by 'planet that shouldn't exist'

The search for planets outside our solar system—exoplanets—is one of the most rapidly growing fields in astronomy. Over the past few decades, more than 5,000 exoplanets have been detected and astronomers now estimate ...

Hubble spotted a supernova in NGC 5806

(Phys.org)—A new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows NGC 5806, a spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo (the Virgin). It lies around 80 million light years from Earth. Also visible in this image is a ...

Rare image of Super-Jupiter sheds light on planet formation

Astronomers using infrared data from the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii have discovered a "super-Jupiter" around the bright star Kappa Andromedae, which now holds the record for the most massive star known to host a directly ...

page 8 from 25